Gargoyles was nearly the center of a vast Disney Cinematic Universe, It had Strong Ratings and Years of Planned Additional Seasons, It Also Featured Casts From “Star Trek: The Next Generation”
When Disney Plus launched in November 2019, The Walt Disney Company focused its promotional efforts around original shows like The Mandalorian and legacy content, from its animated classics to the Star Wars and Marvel Cinematic Universe features. But for a lot of longtime fans, one of the platform’s most exciting offerings was one of its least promoted: the entire run of the 1994-1997 animated series Gargoyles. For American animation buffs, Gargoyles was a true revelation back in the 1990s: a fantasy show with deep worldbuilding, an epic expanding story, rich characters, and above all, a developing narrative.
It may be hard to remember these days, when long-arc animated stories are the norm, but when Gargoyles launched, most American animated TV shows were designed for syndication, meaning they might air or be watched in any order. So every episode was meant to start and end with the same status quo, with nothing changing. Gargoyles creator Greg Weisman says that thinking “made it difficult for me to get work back in the day,” because studios knew he specialized in serialized storytelling. I’m like, “Well, yes, but I can do other things too,” he tells Polygon. “They were like, ‘Yyyyyeah, sure you can. We’re going to go with someone else.’”
Weisman and his team, including writer/story editor Michael Reaves, were ahead of their time with Gargoyles. Weisman has had a successful career in TV animation, as the creator of shows like DC’s stellar superhero series Young Justice and Sony Pictures’ The Spectacular Spider-Man, and as a writer-producer on Star Wars Rebels, among many other shows. But his attachment to Gargoyles is particularly clear. Since the show went up on Disney Plus, he’s been using social media to engage with fans, encouraging them to binge and share the show, in hopes that Disney will take notice of the franchise and revive it.
And it’s certainly ripe for further development. The series, about a race of creatures who turn to stone by day and live as flesh by night, started out in 1990s Manhattan, and initially focused on a small group of gargoyle survivors of a massacre in medieval Scotland. The series drew on a number of cast members from Star Trek: The Next Generation, including Marina Sirtis (as the human-hating gargoyle outcast Demona), Jonathan Frakes (as rich industrialist and gargoyle ally/enemy Xanatos), and Brent Spiner (as the mischievous Puck). But eventually, the series traveled around the world to touch on enclaves of gargoyles in many other cultures. Weisman maintains a lengthy FAQ detailing all the worldbuilding that went into the series, and the many planned spinoffs that never came to fruition. In a long, frank talk with Polygon, he talked about his hopes for the future of Gargoyles now that it’s finally available on streaming, explained why the third season of the show is so different from the first two, revealed how OJ Simpson helped kill Gargoyles, and much more.
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